Talk about busy times. You probably saw Guy's blog entry on the redbook we are working on. It is still early in the redbook but it is very promising. One thing I'm working on is describing the tasks and sensors. If you have any ideas on how these could be used, let me know. I've already gathered great information on it and I am excited about the possibilities.

Talking about redbooks, have you seen the latest two redbooks:

Informix Dynamic Server 11: Extending Availability and Replication, SG24-7488-01, Redbooks, published 24 June 2008This book provides an overview of the high availability and enterprise replication features (ER, HDR, RSS, SDS).

Customizing the Informix Dynamic Server for Your Environment,SG24-7522-00, Redbooks, published 11 June 2008This book provides an overview of some of the capabilities of IDS version 11 that enable it to be easily customized for your particular environment. Although many capabilities are available, the focus of this book is on the areas of ease of administration and application development. It describes and demonstrates these capabilities with examples to show how it can be done and provide a model as you begin your customization.

The one before those came out in March and is about security. To see more, go to the following URL:http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi?Query=Informix&SearchMax=250&SearchOrder=4

Also, the IOD conference is just around the corner. We are all busy preparing our material for it.

And that's just in addition to our normal work of talking to customers and getting IDS into more hands!

I was reading recently that scripting languages are becoming more and more popular. One of the benefits listed was that it can increase productivity significantly. That brings me back a long time when I used to argue that you could write a solution in APL so much faster than any of the traditional languages...

PHP is a popular scripting language that is used to create web solutions. Here are some information if you want or need to use it with IDS.

To use IDS with PHP, you need to add the PDO_INFORMIX interface to it. tis interface can be found in PECL:

http://pecl.php.net/package/PDO_INFORMIX

The current version is 1.2.0 and came out in March 2008. You will to use the appropriate Informix CSDK to compile it for your platform.

Note that there is another PHP driver available for IDS 11: PDO_IBM. It is available from IBM in the IBM Data Server Client as a pre-built component. See: